


the house of denial

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider's Bad Parenting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Meteor Shenanigans, Meteorstuck, POV Second Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, dave strider feels jam hours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:28:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23643085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: oh the house of denial has thick wallsand very small windowsand whoever lives there, little by little,will turn to stone.:.Dave disappears, Rose finds him, and they talk.
Relationships: Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider
Comments: 6
Kudos: 72





	the house of denial

**Author's Note:**

> feels jam! feels jam! feels jam! cw for mentioned/alluded to child abuse and ptsd in case you missed the tags stay safe every1 <3
> 
> title & description is from hum, hum by mary oliver. fantastic poem please check it out !!!

Your name is Dave Strider, and you are avoiding your friends. 

You don’t mean to. Seriously. It’s a big meteor—sort of, if you squint—and there’s a lot to do; everyone’s kind of solitary in their own ways, too, so it’s not like there’s a lot of social interaction to actively go out of your way to step around. Okay, so there’s meals and meetings and Karkat’s assbackwards movie nights he still insists on holding even though Vriska has openly threatened severe bodily harm against him, like, three times because of it, but you show up for shit like that. Mostly. It’s just the other stuff, the smaller stuff, the run-ins in the hallway or the bothering Rose in her room or gaming with Terezi that’s been slipping through the cracks from time to time recently. No biggie.

And it's not like you don’t _want_ to see your friends anymore; they’re your friends for a reason, come on. Even Karkat in all his self-righteous, loud-mouthed, dumbfuck glory has kind of grown on you, way more than you’d ever tell him to his face. It’s not them. Seriously. 

You’re just—not used to _this_ , you suppose. When you think of home, your mind still goes back to the simmering asphalt and endless series of heat waves of Houston, the four walls of your bedroom, the turntable and the puppets and the swords in the fridge and the perpetual taste of blood in your mouth. You think of pointy shades and katanas and the searing smell of rubbing alcohol, of blank faces and bruised knuckles and the sun beating down on the back of your neck as you gripped your own sword, palm sweaty, eyes trained on the shifting figure of your Bro on the other side of the roof, sun glinting off his shades like a pair of headlights. Even LOHAC had been something familiar, within the same vein of heat and metal and unrelentingness. You hadn’t felt as if you belonged—that’s not something you _need_ to feel, you remind yourself, or particularly care about, anyways—but at least it had been familiar, an environment you recognized. You were left alone until something was trying to kill you. Easy money.

Not that Bro was ever trying to kill you. You remind yourself of that, too, when you have to. 

But this, the stupid meteor feels so different. It’s quiet and weird and there’s nothing to _do_ The fridge is filled with food which scares you, for some reason; you’ve been avoiding going near it like the fucking plague; there’s no cameras in the bathroom—Rose gives you a look like you’ve grown a second head when you ask about that. The only swords lying around are yours and you’re not sure why, but this all makes you so angry. It’s not normal, and no one seems to get that. Karkat just looks at you like you’re dumb and Kanaya looks gently concerned and neither Terezi nor Vriska seem to give a fuck and you cannot _stand_ the way Rose stares at you whenever you bring up how fucking surreal your guys’ living situation is. Just thinking about it makes your head feel heavy and light at the same time, so you don’t. 

So you start avoiding the common room a little bit more, first just during the times when you know everyone’s about to be piled up inside it, bickering over the remote or couch space or whose turn it is to make dinner. Then during mealtimes themselves—‘cause, honestly, Karkat can’t cook to save his fucking life and you’ve been careful to keep plenty of food stockpiled in your room anyways, so there’s not a whole lot of point in going. Then for a day at a time, maybe, sometimes two, but you’re alway careful to reemerge after a point just so no one thinks you’ve died. And, in the meantime, you stay on Pesterchum, respond to the barrage of messages Rose and Karkat send, you even though just reading the latter’s makes your ears ring and following up with.

But, hey, no man is perfect, not even Dave Strider himself, so sometimes you just—lose the thread, so to speak. Sometimes the thread catches on fire and all a dude can do is just sit by and watch it burn up because, hey, the fire’s cool and it’s not like there’s shit else to do here; you can only watch troll Brokeback Mountain so many times before you start to get a tension headache. 

Point is, sometimes you disappear, and sometimes you disappear for a three days straight and also conveniently missplace your phone, meaning you’re off Pesterchum, too. You spend most of your time in your room, anyways, so it’s not like your friends couldn’t find you if they really tried—and the fact that no one’s come to bust down your door SWAT team-style means you can’t help but think that no one’s really that worried in the first place. And you’re fine, anyways, so there’s literally nothing to panic about. You’ve got your food, you’ve got your ill beats, you’ve got your ceiling to stare at when all else fails. The fuck else could a guy ask for?

After about the seventieth hour, though, even your ceiling starts to lose its appeal, so you go for a walk. It may be a small space to spend three years cooped up on, relatively speaking, but the meteor isn’t _small,_ exactly, and you’re spent the better part of your time on it so far exploring. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Karkat, sometimes with Terezi if she isn’t too busy being surgically attached to Vriska. Rose and Kanaya never come, Kanaya because of her kinda scary beef with Gamzee and Rose because she doesn’t want Kanaya to feel like she’s being left alone. And yet she still insists that the two of them are just friends. It’s ridiculous.

Walking helps, too. Again, your room is dope, but Dave Stider is a man of action, a connoisseur of kicking ass and taking names; containing yourself within the same four walls for coming on three days never does you any good. Though you find yourself hating nearly every single thing about this dumbass space rock, one thing you can’t complain about is the amount of space there is to move around. It’s a small place to spend three years stuck in, but large enough where you can walk in circles for hours without ever seeing the same place twice which is, admittedly, really kind of nice. 

The hallway is quiet as you step out of your room into it; everyone’s probably in the common room right now, or holed up in their own bedrooms. Feeling oddly as if you’re doing something you shouldn’t be—which is dumb as anything; this is your meteor as much as it is anyone else’s, and you’re allowed to leave your room and go for a walk if you want, _god_ —you head down the hall and start making random turns. The further you get away from the rooms, the kitchen, the common room, the better you feel; by the time you stumble on some closed-air viewing platform type thing, you’re almost fully relaxed. 

The room is big and cold and totally empty. Sort of like a perfect clown lair, you think, but push that thought aside as you head to the window and settle down beside it. Hey, if the clown wants to kill you, he wants to kill you. Not much you can do about it now. 

You’re not sure how long you sit there for, knees against the glass, breath leaving a little circle of fog every time you exhale. It sounds stupid to say, but space is huge. Like, incomprehensibly so. It makes you feel weird sitting there, staring out at the stars around you. Weird and small. 

You could never see the stars back in Houston. One time—you were probably five, six at the time—you remember asking Bro if he wanted to drive the two of you out to the desert to see them. You had been learning about space in school then, and kid you had spent, like, a week being conceived that you were literally going to die if you didn’t see the Big Dipper as soon as possible. But Bro had just laughed, then said no, and that was the end of that. You vaguely remember there being a strife somewhere in there, too, but the details are too hazy. 

You’re not sure if that’s a good thing. Huh. 

“There you are.”

For one weird second, you think it’s him behind you, somehow summoned back to life by your vague musings on him, but then you decide to stop being dumb as rocks, inexplicably, and recognize Rose’s voice, a tense lilt to it. You don’t turn around, which is probably a little rude, but whatever; your heart is pounding all of a sudden, and you’re a bit too focused on trying not to breathe like you just ran a marathon to care. 

There’s no sound of footsteps behind you—she must be doing her stupid floating instead of walking like a _normal_ teenager with the powers of a god thing again—but you feel the presence of her in the room as she enters and heads towards you, suddenly, like someone’s hands are at your back, pushing you forward into the glass. A soft _thud_ sounds behind you as she lands and you find yourself leaning away from the veritable gravitational force that seems to swirl around her, tucking yourself more securely against the wall. You wedge yourself into the corner, hands coming to rest on the ground at your sides, pressing against the cold linoleum.

Like you’re bracing for impact. Like that’s a fucking normal position to adopt whenever your sister walks—floats, _whatever_ —into the room.

If Rose notices the bizarre change in positioning—which she totally does, being real—she doesn’t say anything. You study her for a second in the silence that follows: her makeup is off, lips pale pink instead of their typical black, eyelashes and brows the same white-blonde color as her hair now. She looks, you think, a little tired, with shadows like thumbs of ink resting under her eyes and an almost-imperceptible frown working its way through her brow. You can almost count the stars reflected in her eyes as she looks out in front of her, to the empty space surrounding the meteor.

She's still not looking at you in a way that’s almost determined when she speaks, suddenly, breaking the silence. “It’s been three days since we last saw you.”

And suddenly the weird strain about her, the tightness in her face, the way she stands stock-still, locked in a staring contest with the sky so intense you half-think that the fate of the universe hinges upon a victory on her part all makes sense. They’ve been _looking for you_. Of fucking course. You debate cracking a smile and shooting for a suave-and-cool-yet-appropriately-comforting-without-being-sappy laugh and making some joke about how even the Knight of Time loses track of the clock every once and a while, but something tells you the attempt at levity will be far from appreciated by your sister. It’d be a lame-ass joke, and one not even rooted in truth.

Because, okay, look. It’s not like you _meant_ to fuck off—well, fuck off as much as you can while stuck on a rock hurtling through space—for a full 72 hours and leave everyone thinking that you had fallen into void or gotten eaten by the psycho clown in the ventilation system, but shit just—happens. Whatever. Maybe the Knight of Time really did lose track of the clock, maybe—

Whatever. You resist the urge to press your face into your hands and groan. You’re here, you’re fine, you’re not covered in Faygo hanging with the corpses of your other friends Gamzee has killed, so Rose can stop worrying now. It’s all whatever. 

“Sorry,” you say, finally, the realization that she’s still waiting for you to speak hitting rather slow.

She still hasn’t looked at you, but you can feel her rising irritation like a wave, about to crash down around, destroy your stupid sandcastle and ruin a perfectly good day to the beach. You're not sure what the real-life equivalent of the metaphorical sandcastle is supposed to be. Something about _self-destructive tendencies_ and _unhealthy patterns of isolation_ floats through your head in a vice that sound weirdly like Rose’s, but you push it aside. In-your-head Rose is a crank, and the real thing is still standing next to you, white-knuckling her own elbows as she folds her arms and waits for you to say something a little more substantial.

“I lost track of time?” you offer up, and, wow, it sounds even lamer out loud than it did in your head. 

“We thought you were dead,” she says, a new snap to her voice. You watch as she ducks her head, tucking a stray strand of her hair back behind her headband and blinking, hard.

“C’mon, man,” you say, trying to grin; your face feels stiff, as if out of practice. “Even if the clown did get to me, it’s not like it’d be permanent. I don’t think getting my head bashed in with a bunch of bowling pins would count as a heroic death, exactly.”

She doesn’t laugh. “That’s not the point,” she tells the stars. “That’s not the point and you know it.”

Irritation bites at you all of a sudden. “The fuck is the point, then?”

You watch as she chews the inside of her cheek. “Three days,” she repeats. 

“Yeah. You said.”

“And this isn’t the first time.”

You frown. “What?”

“You keep doing this.” She shakes her head and finally looks down at you, brow still furrowed. Despite the snap to her tone, she doesn’t look mad, really; there’s none of the tight-lipped, blazing-eyes fury that pounds off her in waves on the rare occasions that she does get pissed. Just—

Just concerned. As genuinely concerned as you think you’ve ever seen her. Fuck. 

“I’m sorry,” you say again and try to make it sound like you’re not just a callous shitbag who doesn’t care that he’s spent the last three days inadvertently freaking his sister out. You’re not sure how successful you are. 

“You don’t even deny it?” Rose says, almost incredulous. Her gaze is unreadable, though, searing and nothing else. “That this is a problem?”

That you have a problem is the unspoken line, and you think about tarmac and blood and roof decks for a moment. “Damn. No need to bust out the p-word like that, sis.”

“Jesus Christ, Dave.” She actually pinches her nose now like some long-suffering suburban mom whose kids are spilling juice all over the couch, or something, and you would totally find the mannerism funny as fuck was the humor not evaporating from this situation by the second. 

If there was ever any in the first place. _Fuck_. 

“I’m sorry,” you say again, and it’s all the English you know how to speak now. 

Rose sighs and, after a moment of what looks like silent deliberation on her part, sits facing you. There’s a few inches of space between her knees and yours. She’s staring right at you; you look down at your hands. 

They’re skinny and angular, all hard lines and angles. Long fingers. Scarred knuckles, palms. A particularly nasty one running from the base of your index finger to your wrist; you can’t even remember where it came from but, judging by how faded it is, it’s old. Probably a strife, then. Strife is normally the safe guess as to the cause of any of your old injuries and scars. Strifes with Bro. 

And that’s fine. That’s not something you’ve ever considered questioning or caring about. You and Bro sparred—so what? It was training for the fucking game, man; the dude knew what he was doing and, more importantly, he was doing it for a good reason. He was doing it to help you—what are you supposed to do, be angry with him for that? So your knuckles are busted up and you’ve got some scars and you haven’t opened the fridge without someone else in the kitchen yet because you want someone to be there to stop you from bleeding out in case a shuriken falls into your eye, or something. So fucking what?

You clench and unclench your hands in your lap methodically. You can feel Rose’s stare burn through the crown of your head. For someone as obnoxiously hyper-verbal as she can be, she’s dead silent now. It’s almost worse. 

“Dave,” she says finally, passing a hand over her face. “I’m—I mean this seriously when I say that I’m not here to—psychoanalyze you right now, and what I’m about to say is not an attempt at getting you to let me to that in the future, either.”

“But,” you say, and smile a little. Because it’s Rose, because there’s always a but to stuff like this. 

And the gesture still feels out of practice. Whatever. 

“But this isn’t going away,” Rose says, waving a hand vaguely. “This—whatever is happening—won’t simply disappear just because you decide to. You know that.”

And you do. But it’s a little hard to concede that point when you’re not even sure what _is_ happening, and you know that, whatever it is, it’s probably way less of a deal than you’re making it out to be. Because, you know, you’re Dave Strider, Ultimate Little Bitch, Knight of Knowing Fuckall About What’s Wrong With Yourself And Making A Scene To Compensate. 

“I know,” you say. It sounds a lot softer than you planned for. “It’s just—man, I don’t even know. It’s stupid as fuck.”

Rose hums a little and shifts closed. “Don’t,” she says, shockingly gentle, and something tightens in the pit of his stomach. “It’s not. Not if it’s bothering you.”

“Rose, I can’t open the fridge.”

You watch as something incomprehensible—fuck you and your embarrassingly low levels of emotional literacy, then—passes across her face. She stares at your hands for a second—you’re gripping them together way tighter than you though, you realize—and looks back up at you. 

“Okay,” she says, tipping her head to the side. “I’m assuming this is due to some deeper psychological issue and not due to appliance malfunctions on our part?”

You can’t even bring yourself to laugh. “There’s food in it.”

“In the fridge?"

“Yeah.”

She gives you a look. “That’s generally the purpose of fridges, Dave. To store food and such.”

You nod, because you know this. You’re not crazy. You know what a fucking fridge is for. 

But it still feels wrong; everything about this meteor feels wrong; there’s no tarmac and no puppets and no searing Texas sun and you know this, you’ve been here for long enough to know this all like the back of your hand, so it just doesn’t make sense why this feels so wrong; it doesn’t make sense, this feeing of waiting, of endlessly bracing yourself for something to jump out from the shadows, for the headlight glint of sunglasses and the silence and the notes and the blood and the blood and the fucking _blood_ —

“In my place,” you say loudly, slamming the lid on whatever the fuck your thought process is devolving into, because holy _shit_ , Strider, get it together. “There wasn’t any. Food, I mean.”

Another flicker across Rose’s face. She nods, though, unreactive. “In the fridge specifically, or in general?”

You swallow. This is getting tricky; on one hand, there’s still time to turn tail and get the fuck out of this conversation, make some dumb joke and brush it off and lie through your teeth in saying sure, you’ll stop fucking off to the edges of the meteor for concerning amounts of time every couple of weeks. And part of you knows that Rose will accept that, even if she doesn’t believe it. Because you can tell she’s tired and stressed and probably hasn’t slept in as long as you’ve been MIA and you know from hefty personal experience that lies are so much easier to believe when they’re what you want to hear.

Or, on the other hand, you could tell her the truth. 

“Um,” you say, stalling, your two options practically flashing above her head like she’s some sort of NPC in those shit-ass video games you used to love playing before the X-Box broke. 

Before the X-Box broke because Bro threw it at you. Because you had lost your tenth strife that week. Because you had asked for food, for money to at least buy food. Because you had been there, and he had been there, and it was just one of those days. Because, because, because it doesn’t fucking matter, none of that shit matters anymore because it happened and it’s in the past and Bro is dead and why the _fuck_ are you still so worked up over your goddamn _X-Box_ from when you were in second grade, you little _baby_ —

“In general,” you say, selecting Option Two. Man, are you gonna fucking regret this. “But in the fridge specifically, saying as that’s where you, like, keep food and shit.” You swallow again. “Like swords.”

“Swords,” Rose echoes. Her hands are folding on top of one another, over and over again.

“Yeah. He—Bro, he was big on weapons. Kept ‘em all over the house. In the kitchen especially—all over the counters and shit, in the pantry, sometimes even in the fucking oven, like—” You laugh, the sound too loud to your own ears. “Man, what the fuck? Why put a fucking _katana_ in the _oven_ , of all places, dude?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Rose says, and she sounds strained. 

“I didn’t eat much,” you say. “I mean, when there was school it was fine, cause I’d just eat a fuck ton during lunch and, like, sneak some shit home if I could, but during the summer it, uh, it got rough sometimes.”

During the summer, during the endless blocks of sun hot enough to melt the pavement and staring at the same four walls for weeks on end and strife after strife after strife because you were both bored and restless and the heat and humidity made the two of you fucking crazy. 

“It’s fine,” you’re quick to add, for lack of anything else to say, even though you feel hot and sweaty all over again, even though your mouth tastes of iron so strongly you have to bite back a gag. Motherfucker. “It was fine.”

Rose doesn’t interject, or combat you, or give any sort of indication that she’s even been listening to a word of this new talking-out-of-your-actual-ass thing you’ve got going on. She has, of course, and she has the weirdest expression on her face right now, like she’s she’s two seconds from exploding into a million pieces.

She’s waiting for you to talk, you realize, and somehow this new strategy she’s employing is a billion times more effective than her ceaseless questioning and verbal repartee ever is; the silence feel like someone is screaming in your ears and you cannot for the fucking life of you keep quiet for any longer.

“I used to steal a lot.”

She nods, closing her eyes for a second. “Food?”

“Yeah.” You pick at your nails for a second, then stop, because your hands are starting to shake and you can literally _feel_ Rose picking up on the fact, god damnit. “There was some quickie-mart right around the corner from our apartment and—fuck, I mean, what else was I supposed to do? If I took cash from him, he’d serve me up my ass on cheap paper plate before I could fucking blink twice, but he never gave a shit if I took from other people. He was—fucking weird like that, I guess. I don’t know. I never thought it was weird.” 

Rose shifts again. Your knees are almost touching. 

“But I can’t open the fridge,” you say, laughing a little, because it really is so dumb when you lay it all out, think about it for even more than second. “Like, is that not so stupid? I spent thirteen goddamn years having to steal food for dinner every other week and thought that was just how it was for everyone and now I’m _here_ on this stupid space rock and I can’t open our fucking fridge because—holy _fuck—”_

You’re dimly aware of your voice starting to get louder and louder, echoing around the corner you’ve backed yourself into, and Rose starts to stiffen in front of you just a little, hands finally going still in her lap; you’re starting to _really_ freak her out now, you know that, but you just can’t make yourself shut up now. You’ve started and your don’t know how to stop. 

“It feels fake,” you say, dragging your hands through your hair. “Right? Like, I swear to god I’m gonna walk into the kitchen and go to the stupid fridge and open it to get some AJ and a fucking ninja star is gonna fall into my eye or I’ll get skewered by his sword or there’s gonna be one of his lame-ass pipe bombs in there, or whatever the fuck they were, and it’s gonna go off and I’m gonna get my shit rocked and he’ll just be standing there watching me and—and, holy shit, isn’t that so stupid?” You pull at the hair on the back of your neck, tilting your head up because suddenly looking at Rose is really hard. “‘Cause I know it’s—man, I know that ain’t gonna happen, I know there’s just food in there and that’s a good, normal fucking thing but I just keep thinking—like, what if it isn’t, you know? What if this is all some dream, or joke, or a fucking prank and I’m gonna wake back up in my room and everything’s gonna be the same and it’ll be even fucking worse because I was actually dumb enough to let myself get used to a different reality, or whatever.” You pull your knees to your chest and drop your forehead down. “It’s so stupid. I’m being so stupid, but I just—I don’t wanna test the universe, you know? Like, hell, I’ll stay in my room for the next two and a half years straight if that’s what I gotta do to—to fucking stay with you guys. But then I feel crazy, right? ‘Cause I keep thinking that that’s, like, a _normal_ way to think about things and I keep trying to think that _everything_ from my—old life, or whatever was normal, and that’s so fucked, ‘cause I _know_ it wasn’t, but I just—I just wanna keep thinking like that, right? I just wanna keep thinking it was all fine and this is how people are supposed to feel about—fucking _kitchen appliances,_ Christ, ‘cause—” 

You take a huge breath in, feeling shaky from the inside out, and grip your shins. Fuck. _Fuck_. 

“‘Cause what am I supposed to do then, you know? If I say okay, yeah, it was fucked up, I had to steal food and went to the ER so much the nurses knew my fucking name and my fourth grade teacher called CPS on him, like, three times and he just pulled me outta school for the rest of the year in response and he beat the _dogshit_ outta me on the daily and it was all so fucked up, but what then?”

You swallow back what feels like a mouthful of quicksand. “I don’t know what to do with that. It’s so fucking stupid, but I just don’t know what to do then.”

“Dave,” Rose says, and her voice is shaking just a little. “Can I give you a hug?”

You blink against your knees and slowly look up. She’s not crying—thank god, because you really would not know how to handle how shitty that would make you feel—but looks like she’s biting the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood now and she’s gone the same colors as the stars outside, bone-white. 

And a part of you—a stupid, stupid, _stupid_ part—almost says no. 

But then you remember that it’s Rose, that for all her godly anger and balling out with the Elder Gods and occasional fits of violent and vindictive self-destruction, she has never, ever laid a finger on you when you didn’t want it, and she’s always the person who’s bringing you food and water and knocking on your door and scouring the goddamn meteor when you up sticks and fuck off for 72 hours and she loves you. You know she loves you. She’s told you she loves you, and she isn’t lying, because Rose doesn’t lie.

_But maybe—_

“Yeah,” you say, nodding maybe a little too eagerly. “Yeah, okay.”

And then you sort of fall forward into her, chin bumping against her shoulder as she pulls you in, and you go to apologize, to say sorry, because this is dumb and you’re still being dumb, of course, but then her hand is on the back of your neck, running through your hair, other one smoothing up and down across your back, her cheek on your shoulder, and this is so nice that you forget to speak for a second. 

“You aren’t stupid,” she says, almost whispering, and you feel her voice buzzing through you. “You were a child who was put in a beyond awful situation and never given a healthy frame of reference to compare it against. You were a child who needed to feel like the treatment he received was typical and understandable because how else would you have gotten through it?”

“But I should have—” 

“No.” You feel her shake her head against you. “There is nothing you should or shouldn’t have done. You cannot put a child in that situation and expect _him_ to be the one to accommodate and adjust. You weren’t the adult, your Bro was, and regardless of intentions, regardless of a convoluted desire to man you up or train you, or however else he justified his behavior, _he_ should have done better. His job was to keep you safe, and he failed, and it’s not stupid to acknowledge that.” She sighs. “Or feel the effects, or find yourself slipping back into old patterns of behavior. That’s _normal._ That’s _okay._ You’re allowed to feel these things, Dave.”

You just grit your teeth, throat suddenly very tight. 

She squeezes you harder. “It goes without saying his treatment of you was, well, fucked. That is something you’re going to have to come to terms with as best as you can. And it will be new and frustrating and scary and you will probably be forced to confront a lot of challenging aspects of your past.”

_Damn, Rosie, don’t make it sound so tempting_ you want to say, but can’t because you’re pretty sure that you open your mouth even in the slightest and the next noise that comes out is going to be a sob. 

“But that’s why I’m here,” she continues. “That’s why all your friends are here—and they are your friends, Dave, and they love and care for you very much—to help. To make this easier. To be there to open fridges and come find you when you disappear and hold you and remind you that—not to resort to useless platitudes, but that what happened to you was horrible and wrong and a disgusting abuse of an innocent child, but it was not your fault, and it never will be. That’s why we’re here, Dave.”

You sniff, nose prickling. “Fuck,” you get out. The word sounds broken, cracked-up and mangled. Huh. Fitting.

You’re not sure how long you guys sit there. When you finally pull back, she swipes at her cheeks with the heel of her hand and you feel guilt burn a hole from your chest to your stomach, straight down. You’ve never seen Rose cry, not even in her worst moments, not even when the two of you stood side-by-side, staring down the timer that was counting down until the ends of your lives; the fact that the thing that finally breaks her down is you and your bullshit makes you want to smack your head against the glass a few times.

“I’m sorry.”

She gives you a long, sort of sad look. “Don’t,” she says simply, and stands, offering you her hand. “Come on.”

You take it and hoist yourself up. She bumps your shoulder with hers when you’re on your feet. The starts outside look the same, a never-ending expanse, and you feel heavy and light at the same time, drained, spent. You lean against her for a second. _Fuck_ , you’re tired.

“Bed time, I think,” she says, a soft smile in her voice, and takes your hand—this is all, you realize vaguely, startling intimacy from her, and it makes you feel a weird, sad and happy at the same time—pulling you towards the door. “And you will be coming to breakfast tomorrow morning, by the way. I have no compunction with siccing Karkat on you if I have to.”

You snort a little, and let yourself be pulled. 

“Thanks,” you say after a pause, the light from the overhead lamps flickering, throwing shadows down the hall. You think about killer clowns for a second, but let it pass. Bigger fish to fry now, or whatever.

“For?”

“That whole shebang back there. You know.” You blink. “Everything, really.”

She smiles, and squeezes your hand again. And you feel like a bag of garbage someone ran over with an eighteen-wheeler twelve times just to prove a point, but her grip is strong without it being crushing and she’s filling you in on all the dumb shit Karkat’s gotten up to in the past few days and you start to think, just for a second, that things might start to be on their way to being okay.


End file.
